Not Applicable.
Not Applicable.
The present invention relates to reconstructing and paving roads. More specifically, the present invention is a cold in-place recycling (CIR) method for designing an asphalt emulsion mix and building a road.
Traditionally, when roads are rehabilitated, material is milled and removed. Then, hot mix is brought to the construction site and placed on the milled area. One disadvantage with such a process is that it is time consuming because it requires two operations. In one operation, the road is milled up, and the material is removed. Then, in the second operation, the hot mix asphalt is transported to the site and placed on the milled pavement. Another disadvantage with such a process is that the milled material is often not reused.
More recently, roads that are in fair or poor condition have been replaced or rehabilitated using cold in-place recycling (CIR) of the bituminous material that makes up the road. However, these CIR processes lack thorough designs and thus have consistency problems, such as inconsistency in emulsion content. Many times they do not provide the desired performance. Still further, roads made with conventional CIR processes are unreliable, and many times this leads to raveling, pot holes, rutting, disintegration problems, and cracks.
In order to overcome these disadvantages, a process that provides better road performance while using recycled materials is needed.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a cold in-place recycling method that has improved performance and more consistency so that severely distressed pavement can be rehabilitated.
According to the present invention, the foregoing and other objects are achieved by a method of reconstructing a road. This method includes taking representative cores of the road, analyzing the cores, crushing the cores, selecting a solvent-free emulsion based on climate history, mixing the emulsion and reclaimed asphalt pavement particles (RAP) to form an asphalt emulsion mix, and testing the asphalt emulsion mix for performance using a raveling test, a thermal cracking prediction test by indirect tensile testing, a moisture susceptibility test incorporating vacuum saturation, and a dry Marshall stability test. It also includes designing a CIR layer based on this test data. It further includes grinding off a layer of the existing asphalt leaving at least about an inch of pavement, adding an emulsion to the reclaimed asphalt pavement particles, applying the designed cold in-place recycled layer to the road, and compacting it.
Additional objects, advantages, and novel features of the invention will be set forth in the description that follows and in part will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following, or may be learned by practice of the invention.